Editorial: Instead of Calexico, Trump should have gone to Otay Mesa in his border visit

EL CENTRO, CA 4/5/2019: President Donald Trump salutes military service members after arriving at Naval Air Facility El Centro aboard Air Force One, for a visit to a newly completed section of the border fence in nearby Calexico.

Howard Lipin / U-T

The San Diego region urgently needs more federal resources at the border.

On Friday, President Donald Trump paid his second visit to the California-Mexico border, visiting Calexico to hail the construction of two miles of replacement fencing. Trump also met with Border Patrol agents, who told the president they shared his high opinion of border walls’ effectiveness. But that wasn’t all they had to say.

“We are not prepared to deal with the amount of people, families, children and now organized caravans coming across our border today,” said Gloria Chavez, El Centro’s Border Patrol chief. “Our resources are extremely strained. Our agents are being stretched in so many different directions.”

If Trump had instead visited the border 100 miles to the west, he would have seen exactly what Chavez was talking about. As detailed in a report in The San Diego Union-Tribune, the reassignment of agents from checking incoming vehicles to processing asylum seekers and other migrants has created delays of six hours or more at the Otay Mesa border crossing. One trucker said the conditions were the worst he’d seen in his 10 years going back and forth between Mexico and California.

This is awful news for the San Diego-Tijuana binational economy, a job-creating engine with an annual gross regional product of $255 billion. It’s vitally important that Trump and Congress heed Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s “urgent request” for more border resources to minimize the fallout from the influx of asylum seekers.